Zvi Artstein

Zvi Artstein was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv

Zvi Artstein was born in Tel Aviv in 1943 and grew up there, the son of Gita and Avraham Artstein. His uncle, Zecharia Artstein, was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and many of his relatives died in the Holocaust.

He served in the Paratroopers Brigade and fought in the Six Day War as a reservist, where he was wounded. He studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, finishing in 1968, and then earned advanced degrees in mathematics under Israel Aumann, submitting his doctorate in 1973.

After lecturing at Brown University, he joined the Weizmann Institute in 1975. He became a full professor in 1985 and served as dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science from 1989 to 1998 and again from 2005 to 2010. From 1999 to 2002 he was the institute's vice president for technological applications and chairman of the Yeda company.

His research covered dynamical systems, control systems and limit theorems for set-valued random variables. Several results carry his name, including Artstein's Theorem on stabilization by continuous feedback. He wrote more than 130 papers and a popular book on mathematics and evolution that was translated into English, Japanese and Italian.

He retired in 2016 but continued his research. He died in 2025.